Connections Role in CRM 2011

CRM 4.0 provided the ability to define the relationship between entities using the Relationship feature. However this was only available for defining relations between Account, Contact and Opportunity. This concept has been enhanced further with the introduction of Connections in CRM 2011. Moreover, this has now been extended to include any entities including custom entities that you define.

Connections can basically be used to define the relation or the association between two entities. To give an example you can have an account with multiple contacts. With the help of connection you can define that one of the contact is actually the partner in the company and another an employee.

One can define any number labels for the relationships Like:

Family relationships (father, sister, brother, spouse/partner, cousin)
Social relationships (tennis partner, golf partner, club member, friend)
Sales relationships (champion, influencer, stakeholder, referrer, gatekeeper)
Business relationships (supplier, partner, consultant, contractor, competitor, former employer)

When you create a connection role, you can select the CRM entities for which this connection role can be used. In the below example we have created a role called “Employer” and made it available to be associated with the Account entity.


After users choose the records that will participate in the relationship, they can select from available labels in the respective relationship form. Only valid labels based on the definition of the entity types in the relationship role are displayed.

Managing Relationship roles is the task of choosing the labels that will represent valid options when users define these types of relationships. When you define the labels, you also define which combination of account, contact, or opportunity records will be valid for the label. Setting consistent relationship roles allows users to select meaningful labels for the relationship roles they set that can be used in a report or an Advanced Find query.

Users are not required to choose labels when they set relationships. They can just enter a description in the relationship.

To enable the Connections Role on any entity we need to permit to create connection at the entity level. As shown in the below screenshot.


Once Connections is enabled for an entity it cannot be disabled.

How to Create Connections for the Related records in the CRM 2011:

To Create the connection Open an account and go to Connections and click on the Connect  To Another. As shown in the below screenshot.

In the following window you can enter the related entity along with the role that needs to be associated.

You can see this same connection on the related record as well as shown below.


Hope this helps!

CRM Relationship Behavior (contd) - Cascading rule for Relationship Behavior

We had written on CRM Entity Relationships in one of our earlier post on this blog. To take this further today we would like to discuss the way the settings for the Cascading Rules affect the related entities when an action is performed on the main entity.

Cascading Rules:

Following action can be taken on the parent entity
- Assign
- Delete
- Merge
- Reparent
- Share
- Unshare
The cascading rules let you decide the action to be taken on the child entities when any of the above action is taken on the Parent. This helps you decide how to handle the child entities and if you want them to behave differently than the parent entity.

Say suppose you want Delete the parent entity, what action should be taken for the related child entities. Ideally you may want the child to be deleted along with the parent. But sometimes you may want it otherwise. You want to keep the child entities and delete the association with the Parent. You can define this using the cascading rules.

The following options are available.

Cascade All:
Perform the action on the primary entity as well as related entity.
e.g. if an account is assign to another user from current user then all its related contact will get assigned to the new user.

Cascade None:
Perform the action on the primary entity but not on the related entity.
e.g. if we delete a contact and do not want to delete the activity related to the contact, use Cascade None.

Cascade Active:
Perform the action on the primary entity. Also it performs the action on related entities which are active or open.
e.g. If we delete an account from CRM, using this rule we can avoid the deletion of related invoice and orders.

Cascade User-Owned:
Perform the action on the primary entity. It performs the action on cascade entity only if the related entity has same owner as that of the primary entity.
e.g. We can delete all the contacts related to an account which have the same owner and leave others untouched using this rule.

Remove Link:
Perform the action on the primary entity and remove the link of related entity. Do not perform any action on the related entity.
e.g. If we want to just delete the account and remove the link of account from contact, we can use this rule.

Restrict:
Perform the action only and only if no related entity exists. If any related entity exists the action is cancelled. This rule is applied on “Delete” action only.
e.g. If we don’t want to allow user to delete an account having any contact then we can use this rule to disallow user from performing “Delete” operation.

Understanding the way the relationships work goes a long way in working with Dynamics CRM. It helps you provide simple solutions to seemingly tough tasks.

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Posted by: Inogic
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CRM Relationship Behavior

The blog will help you in the scenarios when you requires to move records from one user to another user with some conditions. Like in scenario one of your sales rep leave the organization and you need to assign his records to the newly joined rep but you also need to keep the history of this old rep (completed work like activities etc) in such scenario you need to check what type relationship behavior is applied in your entity relationship.

The relationship behavior feature of CRM handles action output as per specified settings. Like you can decide major actions Assign, Delete, Share to be handled properly. Say you assigned accounts from one user to another user and in this action you also need to assign all active calls to new user but not need to assign completed call then in such scenario you need to provide relationship behavior of Account-Phone Call entity to Configurable Cascading and set apply rule as “Cascade Active” for Assign action. This will apply changes as per discussed above.


The different type of behaviors provided are,
Parental
o In a parental relationship between two entities, any action taken on a record of the parent entity is also taken on any child entity records that are related to the parent entity record. if you delete a record in the parent entity, the related child entity records are also deleted; or if you share a parent entity record, the related records from the child entity are also shared. All option are disable for Parental relationship
Referential
o In a referential relationship between two entities, you can navigate to any related records, but actions taken on one will not affect the other
Referential, Restrict Delete
o Actions taken on parent will not affect child record but parent record cannot be deleted till the child record exists. i.e you cannot delete a record when related records exist.
Configurable Cascading
o You need to specify your setting here.

The type we are interested here is “Configurable Cascading”. It allows you to decide what type of behavior we need to apply.

The useful details of different cascading rules are (note here me is referred to the user on whom you will perform actions)
• Cascade All: Perform action on all of my child records. Like if assigned my account to another user then all my activities, orders, invoices etc are assign to new user including open, completed and other user owned records
• Cascade Active: Perform action on only my active child records
• Cascade User-Owned: Perform action on all my child records which is owned by me
• Cascade None: do nothing to my child records
• Remove Link: remove link from child record
• Restrict: Applies to Delete. The delete is not allowed if there are other entity instances that reference the ID of the entity instance being deleted.